As through a glass darkly: Rethinking sincerity through the lens of ikhlāṣ

Abstract

Standard Euro-American ideas of sincerity revolve around an idea of the transparent alignment of one’s outer acts with the inner self, such that the audience can clearly deduce the latter from the former. The development and spread of such ideas has been widely linked to the emergence of modern subjectivity. This article expands upon these analyses, contrasting them with Islamic notions of sincerity (ikhlāṣ) which is predicated not on transparency, but on purity of intention. This apparently minor difference has significant implications: it allows for sincerity to be opaque or deceptive; it gestures towards radically different technologies of self-formation; and it questions the facile and widespread elision of modernity with a particular version of sincerity.